| Abstract/Description or Keywords |
The Bulkley Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP) requires that monitoring be undertaken to ensure that water and fish habitat objectives are met (Bulkley Valley Community Resources Board and Interagency Planning Team 1998). An interagency/licensee committee (see Acknowledgements) was asked to develop a monitoring plan. This was a major task, given 68 watersheds with diverse hydrology, geomorphology, and aquatic resources within a 7620 km2 timber supply area (TSA). The committee recognized that each watershed needed to be reviewed individually to identify values that would be sensitive to forestry-induced watershed changes. Also, the committee reviewed existing approaches, such as watershed assessments (B.C. Ministry of Forests and BC Environment 1999) and watershed classification (Cheong 1996), and discussed the challenge with hydrologists and geomorphologists. The conclusion was that we needed to create a process-based, watershed overview approach to identify appropriate parameters. The committee also recognized that it would be impossible to individually examine each watershed, so a simple approach to ranking watersheds, based on past/proposed forest harvesting and aquatic values was adopted. We ranked all 68 watersheds and identified appropriate monitoring approaches in 29 watersheds over five weeks. This article details our approach to watershed monitoring. |
